Federated authentication – OpenID Connect

Alex Howard writes: “Being able to prove that we are who we say we are matters, and we choose a wide range of ways to prove it to one another, with varying levels of certainty, depending upon how important it is that the parties know one another. … Here’s the nut of this issue: governments need ways to authenticate the growing numbers of citizens going online to access digital services. Around the globe, hundreds of millions of people want digital services, increasingly provided through connected mobile devices. For instance, just think about renewing a driver’s license or passport, reserving space in public parks, or accessing records. There are many approaches to providing these services. … The digital glue that could bind many of these efforts together is likely to come from OpenID Connect, a standard, secure way for developers to enable users to choose from a variety of identity providers. If you’ve used a social networking account like Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ to identify yourself to an application or service, you already know how it works.”